4) Who/what were the major figures, actions, successes, and set backs in the fight for equality for your group?
Immediately after the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony, a strong and outspoken advocate of women's rights, demanded that the Fourteenth Amendment include a guarantee of the vote for women as well as for African-American males. In 1869, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. Later that year, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. However, not until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 did women throughout the nation gain the right to vote.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, women and women's organizations not only worked to gain the right to vote, they also worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms. Between 1880 and 1910, the number of women employed in the United States increased from 2.6 million to 7.8 million. Although women began to be employed in business and industry, the majority of better paying positions continued to go to men. At the turn of the century, 60 percent of all working women were employed as domestic servants. In the area of politics, women gained the right to control their earnings, own property, and, in the case of divorce, take custody of their children. By 1896, women had gained the right to vote in four states (Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah). Women and women's organizations also worked on behalf of many social and reform issues. By the beginning of the new century, women's clubs in towns and cities across the nation were working to promote suffrage, better schools, the regulation of child labor, women in unions, and liquor prohibition.
Not all women believed in equality for the sexes. Women who upheld traditional gender roles argued that politics were improper for women. Some even insisted that voting might cause some women to "grow beards." The challenge to traditional roles represented by the struggle for political, economic, and social equality was as threatening to some women as it was to most men.
It must have been quite a tea party. Jane and Richard Hunt, well-to-do Quakers living in New York just three miles from the small town of Seneca Falls, invited their neighbor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to tea on July 13, 1848. The Hunts also invited several other Quaker women: Mary Ann McClintock, wife of a Quaker minister, and Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha Coffin Wright. Discussion at the tea party centered on the "discontent" these women felt over their legal and civil status in America, and they decided to act upon their frustrations by calling for a women's convention to be held in Seneca Falls the following week. The women placed a notice in the newspaper announcing the dates of the convention and the name of the keynote speaker: Lucretia Mott.
What followed, of course, was the now historic Seneca Falls Convention, the first official meeting in America called to discuss the "social, civil, and religious condition of women." The convention, held from July 19 to 20 in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, produced the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions," a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The "Declaration of Sentiments" made bold demands for its day: it claimed that American women should be given civil and political rights equal to those of American men, including the right to vote. See how the rhetoric of women's rights evolved from the "Declaration of Sentiments" of 1848 to the suffragist arguments that finally prevailed by visiting the EDSITEment lesson plan, Cultural Change.
Read more about the history of the women's suffrage movement by visiting the American Memory Project: "Votes for Women: National American Women's Suffrage Association, 1848-1921." This collection consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign and includes the full text of the "Declaration of Sentiments." At Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930, you can research the participation of women in several reform movements, including women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Finally, if you are looking for resources for middle and high school students on the study of gender issues in American history, go to the U. S. Women's History Workshop. Here you will find teacher workshops on instructing students about issues of gender and an electronic classroom that addresses how images of women in popular culture help shape attitudes toward gender.
Printable Page At the outset of the century, women could not vote or hold office in any state, they had no access to higher education, and they were excluded from professional occupations. American law accepted the principle that a wife had no legal identity apart from her husband. She could not be sued, nor could she bring a legal suit; she could not make a contract, nor could she own property. She was not permitted to control her own wages or gain custody of her children in case of separation or divorce. Broad social and economic changes, such as the development of a market economy and a decline in the birthrate, opened employment opportunities for women. Instead of bearing children at two-year intervals after marriage, as was the general case throughout the colonial era, during the early 19th century women bore fewer children and ceased childbearing at younger ages. During these decades the first women’s college was established, and some men’s colleges first opened their doors to women students. More women were postponing marriage or not marrying at all; unmarried women gained new employment opportunities as “mill girls” and elementary school teachers; and a growing number of women achieved prominence as novelists, editors, teachers, and leaders of church and philanthropic societies. Although there were many improvements in the status of women during the first half of the century, women still lacked political and economic status when compared with men. As the franchise was extended to larger and larger numbers of white males, including large groups of recent immigrants, the gap in political power between women and men widened. Even though women made up a core of supporters for many reform movements, men excluded them from positions of decision making and relegated them to separate female auxiliaries. Additionally, women lost economic status as production shifted away from the household to the factory and workshop. During the late 18th century, the need for a cash income led women and older children to engage in a variety of household industries, such as weaving and spinning. Increasingly, in the 19th century, these tasks were performed in factories and mills, where the workforce was largely male. The fact that changes in the economy tended to confine women to a sphere separate from men had important implications for reform. Since women were believed to be uncontaminated by the competitive struggle for wealth and power, many argued that they had a duty--and the capacity--to exert an uplifting moral influence on American society. Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) and Sarah J. Hale (1788–1879) helped lead the effort to expand women’s roles through moral influence. Beecher, the eldest sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was one of the nation’s most prominent educators before the Civil War. A woman of many talents and strong leadership, she wrote a highly regarded book on domestic science and spearheaded the campaign to convince school boards that women were suited to serve as schoolteachers. Hale edited the nation’s most popular women’s magazines, the Ladies Magazine and Godey’s Ladies Book. She led the successful campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday (during Lincoln’s administration), and she also composed the famous nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Both Beecher and Hale worked tirelessly for women’s education (Hale helped found Vassar College). They gave voice to the grievances of women--abysmally low wages paid to women in the needle trades (12.5 cents a day), the physical hardships endured by female operatives in the nation’s shops and mills (where women worked 14 hours a day), and the minimizing of women’s intellectual aspirations. Even though neither woman supported full equal rights for women, they were important transitional figures in the emergence of feminism. Each significantly broadened society’s definition of “women’s sphere” and assigned women vital social responsibilities: to shape their children’s character, morally to uplift their husbands, and to promote causes of “practical benevolence.” Other women broke down old barriers and forged new opportunities in a more dramatic fashion. Frances Wright (1795–1852), a Scottish-born reformer and lecturer, received the nickname “The Great Red Harlot of Infidelity” because of her radical ideas about birth control, liberalized divorce laws, and legal rights for married women. In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) became the first American woman to receive a degree in medicine. A number of women became active as revivalists. Perhaps the most notable was Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874), a Methodist preacher who ignited religious fervor among thousands of Americans and Canadians. Catalyst for Women’s Rights A public debate over the proper role of women in the antislavery movement, especially their right to lecture to audiences composed of both sexes, led to the first organized movement for women’s rights. By the mid-1830s more than a hundred female antislavery societies had been created, and women abolitionists were circulating petitions, editing abolitionist tracts, and organizing antislavery conventions. A key question was whether women abolitionists would be permitted to lecture to “mixed” audiences of men and women. In 1837 a national women’s antislavery convention resolved that women should overcome this taboo: “The time has come for women to move in that sphere which providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied with the circumscribed limits which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her.” Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) and her sister Sarah (1792–1873)--two sisters from a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina, slaveholding family--were the first women to break the restrictions and widen women’s sphere through their writings and lectures before mixed audiences. In 1837 Angelina gained national notoriety by lecturing against slavery to audiences that included men as well as women. Shocked by this breach of the separate sexual spheres ordained by God, ministers in Massachusetts called on their fellow clergy to forbid women the right to speak from church pulpits. Sarah Grimké in 1840 responded with a pamphlet entitled Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes, one of the first modern statements of feminist principles. She denounced the injustice of lower pay and denial of equal educational opportunities for women. Her pamphlet expressed outrage that women were “regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure” and were taught to believe that marriage is “the sine qua non [indispensable element] of human happiness and human existence.” Men and women, she concluded, should not be treated differently, since both were endowed with innate natural rights. In 1840, after the American Anti-Slavery Society split over the issue of women’s rights, the organization named three female delegates to a World Anti-Slavery Convention to be held in London later that year. There, these women were denied the right to participate in the convention on the grounds that their participation would offend British public opinion. The convention relegated them to seats in a balcony. Eight years later, Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), who earlier had been denied the right to serve as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) organized the first women’s rights convention in history. Held in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the convention drew up a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which opened with the phrase “All men and women are created equal.” It named 15 specific inequities suffered by women, and after detailing “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of men toward woman,” the document concluded that “he has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Among the resolutions adopted by the convention, only one was not ratified unanimously--that women be granted the right to vote. Of the 66 women and 34 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the convention (including black abolitionist Frederick Douglass), only two lived to see the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution 72 years later. By mid-century women’s rights conventions had been held in every northern state. Despite ridicule from the public press--the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegraph denounced women’s rights advocates as “Amazons”--female reformers contributed to important, if limited, advances against discrimination. They succeeded in gaining adoption of Married Women’s Property Laws in a number of states, granting married women control over their own income and property. A New York law passed in 1860 gave women joint custody over children and the right to sue and be sued, and in several states women’s rights reformers secured adoption of permissive divorce laws. A Connecticut law, for example, granted divorce for any “misconduct” that “permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner and defeats the purposes of the marriage relationship.” Black women, too, were active in the campaign to extend equal rights to women. One of the most outspoken advocates for both women’s rights and abolition was Sojourner Truth, born a slave known as Isabella in New York State’s Hudson River Valley around 1797. She escaped from bondage in 1826, taking refuge with a farm family that later bought her freedom. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, convinced that God had called on her to preach the truth throughout the country. Her fame as a preacher, singer, and orator for abolition and women’s rights spread rapidly. At a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she is reported to have demanded that Americans recognize the African American women’s right to equality. “I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear de lash as well!” she told the crowd. “And ain’t I a woman?” During the Civil War, Truth supported the Union, collecting food and supplies for black troops and struggling to make emancipation a war aim. When the war was over, she traveled across the North, collecting signatures on petitions calling on Congress to set aside western lands for former slaves. At her death in 1883, she could rightly be remembered as one of the nation’s most eloquent opponents of discrimination in all forms.
The seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the conference that refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from America because of their sex. Stanton, the young bride of an antislavery agent, and Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran of reform, talked then of calling a convention to address the condition of women. Eight years later, it came about as a spontaneous event. In July 1848, Mott was visiting her sister, Martha C. Wright, in Waterloo, New York. Stanton, now the restless mother of three small sons, was living in nearby Seneca Falls. A social visit brought together Mott, Stanton, Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt. All except Stanton were Quakers, a sect that afforded women some measure of equality, and all five were well acquainted with antislavery and temperance meetings.Fresh in their minds was the April passage of the long-deliberated New York Married Woman's Property Rights Act, a significant but far from comprehensive piece of legislation. The time had come, Stanton argued, for women's wrongs to be laid before the public, and women themselves must shoulder the responsibility. Before the afternoon was out, the women decided on a call for a convention "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman." To Stanton fell the task of drawing up the Declaration of Sentiments that would define the meeting. Taking the Declaration of Independence as her guide, Stanton submitted that "all men and women had been created equal" and went on to list eighteen "injuries and usurpations" -the same number of charges leveled against the King of England-"on the part of man toward woman." Stanton also drafted eleven resolutions, making the argument that women had a natural right to equality in all spheres. The ninth resolution held forth the radical assertion that it was the duty of women to secure for themselves the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton afterwards recalled that a shocked Lucretia Mott exclaimed, "Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous." Stanton stood firm. "But I persisted, for I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured." The convention, to take place in five days' time, on July 19 and 20 at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, was publicized only by a small, unsigned notice placed in the Seneca County Courier. "The convention will not be so large as it otherwise might be, owing to the busy time with the farmers," Mott told Stanton, "but it will be a beginning."A crowd of about three hundred people, including forty men, came from five miles round. No woman felt capable of presiding; the task was undertaken by Lucretia's husband, James Mott. All of the resolutions were passed unanimously except for woman suffrage, a strange idea and scarcely a concept designed to appeal to the predominantly Quaker audience, whose male contingent commonly declined to vote. The eloquent Frederick Douglass, a former slave and now editor of the Rochester North Star, however, swayed the gathering into agreeing to the resolution. At the closing session, Lucretia Mott won approval of a final resolve "for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce." One hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration-although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names. The proceedings in Seneca Falls, followed a few days later by a meeting in Rochester, brought forth a torrent of sarcasm and ridicule from the press and pulpit. Noted Frederick Douglass in the North Star: "A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman."But Elizabeth Cady Stanton, although somewhat discomforted by the widespread misrepresentation, understood the value of attention in the press. "Just what I wanted," Stanton exclaimed when she saw that James Gordon Bennett, motivated by derision, printed the entire Declaration of Sentiments in the New York Herald. "Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken." Stanton, thirty-two years old at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, grew gray in the cause. In 1851 she met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, and shortly the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women. When national victory came in 1920, seventy-two years after the first organized demand in 1848, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration-Charlotte Woodward, a young worker in a glove manufactory -had lived long enough to cast her ballot. As you research your question, keep track of:
What questions do you still have that relate to the topic? What did your topic cause you to wonder about?
4) Who/what were the major figures, actions, successes, and set backs in the fight for equality for your group?
Immediately after the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony, a strong and outspoken advocate of women's rights, demanded that the Fourteenth Amendment include a guarantee of the vote for women as well as for African-American males. In 1869, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. Later that year, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. However, not until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 did women throughout the nation gain the right to vote.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, women and women's organizations not only worked to gain the right to vote, they also worked for broad-based economic and political equality and for social reforms. Between 1880 and 1910, the number of women employed in the United States increased from 2.6 million to 7.8 million. Although women began to be employed in business and industry, the majority of better paying positions continued to go to men. At the turn of the century, 60 percent of all working women were employed as domestic servants. In the area of politics, women gained the right to control their earnings, own property, and, in the case of divorce, take custody of their children. By 1896, women had gained the right to vote in four states (Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah). Women and women's organizations also worked on behalf of many social and reform issues. By the beginning of the new century, women's clubs in towns and cities across the nation were working to promote suffrage, better schools, the regulation of child labor, women in unions, and liquor prohibition.
Not all women believed in equality for the sexes. Women who upheld traditional gender roles argued that politics were improper for women. Some even insisted that voting might cause some women to "grow beards." The challenge to traditional roles represented by the struggle for political, economic, and social equality was as threatening to some women as it was to most men.
It must have been quite a tea party. Jane and Richard Hunt, well-to-do Quakers living in New York just three miles from the small town of Seneca Falls, invited their neighbor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to tea on July 13, 1848. The Hunts also invited several other Quaker women: Mary Ann McClintock, wife of a Quaker minister, and Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha Coffin Wright. Discussion at the tea party centered on the "discontent" these women felt over their legal and civil status in America, and they decided to act upon their frustrations by calling for a women's convention to be held in Seneca Falls the following week. The women placed a notice in the newspaper announcing the dates of the convention and the name of the keynote speaker: Lucretia Mott.
What followed, of course, was the now historic Seneca Falls Convention, the first official meeting in America called to discuss the "social, civil, and religious condition of women." The convention, held from July 19 to 20 in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, produced the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions," a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence. The "Declaration of Sentiments" made bold demands for its day: it claimed that American women should be given civil and political rights equal to those of American men, including the right to vote. See how the rhetoric of women's rights evolved from the "Declaration of Sentiments" of 1848 to the suffragist arguments that finally prevailed by visiting the EDSITEment lesson plan, Cultural Change.
Read more about the history of the women's suffrage movement by visiting the American Memory Project: "Votes for Women: National American Women's Suffrage Association, 1848-1921." This collection consists of 167 books, pamphlets and other artifacts documenting the suffrage campaign and includes the full text of the "Declaration of Sentiments." At Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930, you can research the participation of women in several reform movements, including women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Finally, if you are looking for resources for middle and high school students on the study of gender issues in American history, go to the U. S. Women's History Workshop. Here you will find teacher workshops on instructing students about issues of gender and an electronic classroom that addresses how images of women in popular culture help shape attitudes toward gender.
Period: 1820-1860
At the outset of the century, women could not vote or hold office in any state, they had no access to higher education, and they were excluded from professional occupations. American law accepted the principle that a wife had no legal identity apart from her husband. She could not be sued, nor could she bring a legal suit; she could not make a contract, nor could she own property. She was not permitted to control her own wages or gain custody of her children in case of separation or divorce.
Broad social and economic changes, such as the development of a market economy and a decline in the birthrate, opened employment opportunities for women. Instead of bearing children at two-year intervals after marriage, as was the general case throughout the colonial era, during the early 19th century women bore fewer children and ceased childbearing at younger ages. During these decades the first women’s college was established, and some men’s colleges first opened their doors to women students. More women were postponing marriage or not marrying at all; unmarried women gained new employment opportunities as “mill girls” and elementary school teachers; and a growing number of women achieved prominence as novelists, editors, teachers, and leaders of church and philanthropic societies.
Although there were many improvements in the status of women during the first half of the century, women still lacked political and economic status when compared with men. As the franchise was extended to larger and larger numbers of white males, including large groups of recent immigrants, the gap in political power between women and men widened. Even though women made up a core of supporters for many reform movements, men excluded them from positions of decision making and relegated them to separate female auxiliaries. Additionally, women lost economic status as production shifted away from the household to the factory and workshop. During the late 18th century, the need for a cash income led women and older children to engage in a variety of household industries, such as weaving and spinning. Increasingly, in the 19th century, these tasks were performed in factories and mills, where the workforce was largely male.
The fact that changes in the economy tended to confine women to a sphere separate from men had important implications for reform. Since women were believed to be uncontaminated by the competitive struggle for wealth and power, many argued that they had a duty--and the capacity--to exert an uplifting moral influence on American society. Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) and Sarah J. Hale (1788–1879) helped lead the effort to expand women’s roles through moral influence. Beecher, the eldest sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was one of the nation’s most prominent educators before the Civil War. A woman of many talents and strong leadership, she wrote a highly regarded book on domestic science and spearheaded the campaign to convince school boards that women were suited to serve as schoolteachers. Hale edited the nation’s most popular women’s magazines, the Ladies Magazine and Godey’s Ladies Book. She led the successful campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday (during Lincoln’s administration), and she also composed the famous nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Both Beecher and Hale worked tirelessly for women’s education (Hale helped found Vassar College). They gave voice to the grievances of women--abysmally low wages paid to women in the needle trades (12.5 cents a day), the physical hardships endured by female operatives in the nation’s shops and mills (where women worked 14 hours a day), and the minimizing of women’s intellectual aspirations. Even though neither woman supported full equal rights for women, they were important transitional figures in the emergence of feminism. Each significantly broadened society’s definition of “women’s sphere” and assigned women vital social responsibilities: to shape their children’s character, morally to uplift their husbands, and to promote causes of “practical benevolence.”
Other women broke down old barriers and forged new opportunities in a more dramatic fashion. Frances Wright (1795–1852), a Scottish-born reformer and lecturer, received the nickname “The Great Red Harlot of Infidelity” because of her radical ideas about birth control, liberalized divorce laws, and legal rights for married women. In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) became the first American woman to receive a degree in medicine. A number of women became active as revivalists. Perhaps the most notable was Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874), a Methodist preacher who ignited religious fervor among thousands of Americans and Canadians.
Catalyst for Women’s Rights
A public debate over the proper role of women in the antislavery movement, especially their right to lecture to audiences composed of both sexes, led to the first organized movement for women’s rights. By the mid-1830s more than a hundred female antislavery societies had been created, and women abolitionists were circulating petitions, editing abolitionist tracts, and organizing antislavery conventions. A key question was whether women abolitionists would be permitted to lecture to “mixed” audiences of men and women. In 1837 a national women’s antislavery convention resolved that women should overcome this taboo: “The time has come for women to move in that sphere which providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied with the circumscribed limits which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her.”
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) and her sister Sarah (1792–1873)--two sisters from a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina, slaveholding family--were the first women to break the restrictions and widen women’s sphere through their writings and lectures before mixed audiences. In 1837 Angelina gained national notoriety by lecturing against slavery to audiences that included men as well as women. Shocked by this breach of the separate sexual spheres ordained by God, ministers in Massachusetts called on their fellow clergy to forbid women the right to speak from church pulpits. Sarah Grimké in 1840 responded with a pamphlet entitled Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes, one of the first modern statements of feminist principles. She denounced the injustice of lower pay and denial of equal educational opportunities for women. Her pamphlet expressed outrage that women were “regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure” and were taught to believe that marriage is “the sine qua non [indispensable element] of human happiness and human existence.” Men and women, she concluded, should not be treated differently, since both were endowed with innate natural rights.
In 1840, after the American Anti-Slavery Society split over the issue of women’s rights, the organization named three female delegates to a World Anti-Slavery Convention to be held in London later that year. There, these women were denied the right to participate in the convention on the grounds that their participation would offend British public opinion. The convention relegated them to seats in a balcony.
Eight years later, Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), who earlier had been denied the right to serve as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) organized the first women’s rights convention in history. Held in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the convention drew up a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which opened with the phrase “All men and women are created equal.” It named 15 specific inequities suffered by women, and after detailing “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of men toward woman,” the document concluded that “he has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”
Among the resolutions adopted by the convention, only one was not ratified unanimously--that women be granted the right to vote. Of the 66 women and 34 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the convention (including black abolitionist Frederick Douglass), only two lived to see the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution 72 years later.
By mid-century women’s rights conventions had been held in every northern state. Despite ridicule from the public press--the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegraph denounced women’s rights advocates as “Amazons”--female reformers contributed to important, if limited, advances against discrimination. They succeeded in gaining adoption of Married Women’s Property Laws in a number of states, granting married women control over their own income and property. A New York law passed in 1860 gave women joint custody over children and the right to sue and be sued, and in several states women’s rights reformers secured adoption of permissive divorce laws. A Connecticut law, for example, granted divorce for any “misconduct” that “permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner and defeats the purposes of the marriage relationship.”
Black women, too, were active in the campaign to extend equal rights to women. One of the most outspoken advocates for both women’s rights and abolition was Sojourner Truth, born a slave known as Isabella in New York State’s Hudson River Valley around 1797. She escaped from bondage in 1826, taking refuge with a farm family that later bought her freedom. She took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, convinced that God had called on her to preach the truth throughout the country. Her fame as a preacher, singer, and orator for abolition and women’s rights spread rapidly. At a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she is reported to have demanded that Americans recognize the African American women’s right to equality. “I could work as much and eat as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear de lash as well!” she told the crowd. “And ain’t I a woman?”
During the Civil War, Truth supported the Union, collecting food and supplies for black troops and struggling to make emancipation a war aim. When the war was over, she traveled across the North, collecting signatures on petitions calling on Congress to set aside western lands for former slaves. At her death in 1883, she could rightly be remembered as one of the nation’s most eloquent opponents of discrimination in all forms.
The seed for the first Woman's Rights Convention was planted in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the conference that refused to seat Mott and other women delegates from America because of their sex. Stanton, the young bride of an antislavery agent, and Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran of reform, talked then of calling a convention to address the condition of women. Eight years later, it came about as a spontaneous event.
In July 1848, Mott was visiting her sister, Martha C. Wright, in Waterloo, New York. Stanton, now the restless mother of three small sons, was living in nearby Seneca Falls. A social visit brought together Mott, Stanton, Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt. All except Stanton were Quakers, a sect that afforded women some measure of equality, and all five were well acquainted with antislavery and temperance meetings.Fresh in their minds was the April passage of the long-deliberated New York Married Woman's Property Rights Act, a significant but far from comprehensive piece of legislation. The time had come, Stanton argued, for women's wrongs to be laid before the public, and women themselves must shoulder the responsibility. Before the afternoon was out, the women decided on a call for a convention "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman."
To Stanton fell the task of drawing up the Declaration of Sentiments that would define the meeting. Taking the Declaration of Independence as her guide, Stanton submitted that "all men and women had been created equal" and went on to list eighteen "injuries and usurpations" -the same number of charges leveled against the King of England-"on the part of man toward woman."
Stanton also drafted eleven resolutions, making the argument that women had a natural right to equality in all spheres. The ninth resolution held forth the radical assertion that it was the duty of women to secure for themselves the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton afterwards recalled that a shocked Lucretia Mott exclaimed, "Why, Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous." Stanton stood firm. "But I persisted, for I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured."
The convention, to take place in five days' time, on July 19 and 20 at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, was publicized only by a small, unsigned notice placed in the Seneca County Courier. "The convention will not be so large as it otherwise might be, owing to the busy time with the farmers," Mott told Stanton, "but it will be a beginning."A crowd of about three hundred people, including forty men, came from five miles round. No woman felt capable of presiding; the task was undertaken by Lucretia's husband, James Mott. All of the resolutions were passed unanimously except for woman suffrage, a strange idea and scarcely a concept designed to appeal to the predominantly Quaker audience, whose male contingent commonly declined to vote. The eloquent Frederick Douglass, a former slave and now editor of the Rochester North Star, however, swayed the gathering into agreeing to the resolution. At the closing session, Lucretia Mott won approval of a final resolve "for the overthrowing of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman equal participation with men in the various trades, professions and commerce." One hundred women and men signed the Seneca Falls Declaration-although subsequent criticism caused some of them to remove their names.
The proceedings in Seneca Falls, followed a few days later by a meeting in Rochester, brought forth a torrent of sarcasm and ridicule from the press and pulpit. Noted Frederick Douglass in the North Star: "A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of woman."But Elizabeth Cady Stanton, although somewhat discomforted by the widespread misrepresentation, understood the value of attention in the press. "Just what I wanted," Stanton exclaimed when she saw that James Gordon Bennett, motivated by derision, printed the entire Declaration of Sentiments in the New York Herald. "Imagine the publicity given to our ideas by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken."
Stanton, thirty-two years old at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, grew gray in the cause. In 1851 she met temperance worker Susan B. Anthony, and shortly the two would be joined in the long struggle to secure the vote for women. When national victory came in 1920, seventy-two years after the first organized demand in 1848, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration-Charlotte Woodward, a young worker in a glove manufactory -had lived long enough to cast her ballot.
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